The Official Post-Christmas Damage Assessment

We
have now reached the middle of January. Christmas and
New Year's are over, the Beautiful Woman and I are back
at work, and - of course - everyone is sick.

I should point out that this is an improvement over last
year. Last year I was sick from the last week of
December until the first week of February. Every time I
thought I was getting better, I came down with something
else. It was miserable.

So the week-long head cold that has afflicted us is
actually pretty wimpy, at least by comparison. It's
still rough, of course: when Theron gets stuffy, he
can't sleep; when he can't sleep, we can't sleep; and
when we can't sleep, we don't get better. Plus, we're
all sick - hence, cranky and lethargic.

The fact that Theron is a year older gives us some
serious advantages, too. His nostrils and sinuses are
larger, and drain more easily. Because he's older, we
can give him more and better medications (cautiously).
He is also a little more willing to sleep in different
positions; last year, he would only sleep with his face
down and his butt in the air, which meant that all the
mucus went straight to his nostrils and kept him from
breathing. This year, we can prop him up with pillows
and let him drain.

So, in summary: having everyone sick is still horrible,
but it's not as bad as it could be. Also, Nyquil is my
friend.

Linguistic acquisitionTheron's recent accomplishments have been in the
area of language. His language comprehension
has been coming along fine for a while now. (A month or
so back, I asked him to put my headphones back up on my
desk, and he did. This prompted my wife, for the eighth
time in as many months, to vow that she would clean up
her language. Last night, I asked Theron if he could
bring me a dinosaur. He wasn't holding anything, and I
was careful not to point. Theron looked around, spotted
the toy dinosaur in the middle of the floor, and brought
it over to me. So his comprehension-vocabulary {and/or
his ability to figure out what we want} is... I was
going to say 'fine', but I think the word I want is
'frightening.')

Recently, however, his language use has
improved, too. Before Christmas, he would repeat words
if prompted, but he used hand signs to ask for things.
Shortly after my last journal entry, he started using
words in conjunctions with some of the signs: "Mo"
together with the sign for 'more', for example. He's
also started using words for things that he doesn't have
signs for: ball, duck, dog (or doggy), mama, dada.

Most interesting, at least to me, is the fact that he's
started babbling. That is, he'll say things that sound
like sentences - long, complex streams of syllables with
the rhythm and timing of a sentence, but no decipherable
words. This is, apparently, fairly typical. Girls tend
to acquire larger speaking-vocabularies (and use words
earlier, in general; one of the girls from the Moms'
Group can greet all the other children by name),
and then figure out how to assemble them into sentences.
Boys, on the other hand, tend to figure out sentence
patterns first, and then slowly find words to plug into
them. Obviously, this isn't true for all children, and
the two skills do overlap, so take the observation with
a grain of salt.

Christmas, New Year's, and the slow return to sanityIn my last entry, I predicted that Theron would
probably be at the plays-with-boxes stage this
Christmas. This was utterly, completely, ridiculously
incorrect.

Theron loved his presents. All
of them. With a huge, strong, overwhelming love.

But let me back up, just a little, before I talk about
the holidays. Waaaaay back when we first got married,
the Beautiful Woman and I set some ground rules to
reduce the amount of stress and chaos in our lives.
Probably the best of these was rule 486b: "We will
not try to visit both sides of the family on any given
holiday, unless there is a really, really convenient way
to do so." In practice, what this means is that
we alternate: one year we spend Christmas day with my
parents and Thanksgiving day with her parents, and the
next year we reverse that. That doesn't mean that we
only see one set of parents; it means that we don't try
to see everyone on the same day. This year, for example,
we had Christmas with my in-laws, and saw my side of the
family the following Saturday.

So, on Christmas Eve, we went to a nice little Disciples
of Christ church for their evening service. In an effort
to keep Theron on a regular sleep schedule, we didn't
try for midnight mass -- and for that matter, we ended
up leaving before the service was really over.
C'est la guerre. We took him back home and got
him into bed just a little later than usual, had a
drink, and went to bed ourselves.

On Christmas morning we got up, had a light breakfast,
and opened our stockings. Theron's stocking included a
Sesame Street DVD -- a full hour of music, basically --
which he clutched gleefully. Theron then got his big
gift from us -- ahem, from Santa -- which was a sort of
plastic parking garage with an elevator and a ramp. The
garage included a small plastic tow truck which makes
tow-truck noises, a small plastic car, and two small
plastic figures to drive them. I showed Theron how to
work the elevator, and he practiced sending the cars
down the ramp while saying, "Whee!" Theron then opened
his next present, which came from some friends; it was a
large plastic dump truck with oversized legos in the
back. Theron immediately dumped out the legos and
started sticking them together.

At this point, I was sitting on the couch and my wife
was sitting in the big pink chair beside it. Theron
comes wandering over to us, weaving slightly, with wide
eyes and a dazed expression on his face. He is, quite
literally, stoned on endorphins. He looks up at us,
raises his hands to make the sign, and says: "Mo? Mo?"
This may possibly have been the cutest thing ever.

So we took him to his grandmother's house, and he got
"mo."

He actually received quite a lot of stuff, but the big
hits were: a ridable plastic zebra (which makes noises
when he moves it), from my wife's sister and her
husband; a toy cell phone (which makes noises when he
opens it), from the Beautiful Woman's mother and father;
and a xylophone (which makes noises when he hits it --
notice a theme, here?) from my parents.

By the time we got to New Year's Eve, the three of us
were pretty well worn out; we had dinner at a nice
Indian restaurant, then went to bed.

January usually marks the beginning of the busy season
for me. We have several seasonal festivals whose sites
need to be updated, plus the usual stream of changes and
updates. This year, however, the season started early:
back around the middle of October. We have two major
projects, in addition to the usual busy season items.
So, the year is off to an interesting start.

Baby's first scar

Theron, with band-aid,
eating naan on New Year's Eve

Okay, so this isn't the sort of milestone that parents
actually look forward to. In keeping with the basic
theme of this journal*, I'm going to talk about it
anyway.

About two weeks ago, owing (I think) to a combination of
new shoes and his latest growth spurt, Theron tripped
and tried to attack the corner of a grandfather clock
with his forehead. This produced a sort of triangular
puncture wound, which bled a lot. The Beautiful Woman
was already taking care of him by the time I got there;
we basically just kept direct pressure on the wound
until it quit bleeding. Then I put a bandaid on it, and
my wife went to the bathroom to throw up.

In retrospect, the most difficult part of all this was
getting him to leave the bandaid alone. Once it quit
bleeding, Theron was basically okay. (He is, as I may
have noted before, pretty good-natured, even when he
feels bad. Plus, he's obviously inherited a high pain
tolerance.) But, he's going to have a narrow, triangular
scar on his forehead.

When he gets older, I'll tell him it makes him look like
a pirate. Arr!

Being a Parent means never admitting that you're
surprised. Most of like to think that we live in a sane,
orderly world. We may like variety, we may even enjoy
danger, but at the end of the day it's nice to be able
to kick back without having to worry about whether
someone has booby-trapped your chair, or whether there's
a bear lurking in your closet.

Sadly, that sense of security - which so many of us take
for granted - ends when you become a parent.

I mention this because I just went to fill the tea pot
with water, and found that someone -- or some
thing -- had filled it with bits of chicken.

I like chicken, but not as a flavoring for my tea.

Toddler JokesTheron has an interesting sense of humor. I'm not
sure how much of it is typical for a boy of his age, and
how much is just him, but either way it's
interesting.

Last night, for example, he fwooped.** He was standing
in the living room, watching the television (Muppets, of
course), and he just... fwooped. Then he
giggled, stood up, and fwooped again -- only this time
he fwooped forward. Then backwards, over and over,
giggling each time. It was very deliberate, and very
silly, and had a certain Vaudeville quality... well,
don't take my word for it.
Watch the video.

The night before that... no, let me set the scene first.
We're getting Theron ready for bed. He's already
finished watching his nightly Muppets allotment, and
I've just finished feeding him. The next steps in the
process are a bath, followed by a few books and brushing
his teeth. Then he puts the wombat and the koala into
his crib, and I put him in with them.

At this point, however, Theron is still sitting in his
chair. His face and hands are covered with mush, as
usually happens when I try to feed him. He motions for
the water bottle - blue plastic, mostly full, and having
one of those tops that you slide up so you can squirt
water into your mouth. I hand it to him, and he tilts it
up and drinks a bit (without any apparent difficulty),
and spills a little on his shirt (also without any
apparent difficulty). I take the bottle back, set it on
the table, and give him another spoonful of mush.

This is when a sinister and mysterious force*** lifts
the water bottle and squirts Theron in the chest with
it. Theron thinks this is hilarious.
("Mo!") So the bottle tilts slowly forward, and he gets
squirted again -- this time in the shoulder. This
repeats through two full refills of the
water bottle, until the boy (and much of the floor) is
soaking wet, and Theron is laughing so hard he can
barely breathe.

It is therefore possible that the chicken bits in the
tea pot were some toddlerish attempt at revenge. If so,
I can only say that he deserves the opportunity.

And now, more gratuitous pics and video. As usual, click to see the full-size images:

Theron rides his new Zebra

Theron drives my car

Theron the Telephonist (video)

* "Parenthood Without Romantic Illusions." Or possibly,
"Why Sleep Would Be A Wonderful Thing." Or anything else
I decide should be the theme, really. "Michael Mock
Likes To Rant" is another good possibility.

** Fwoop - v. (Oe. Fwoopen 'to fall down in a
humorous fashion' prob. from OHG. Fwupen, to slip on
goat droppings - c.f. 'splut'.) 1. To throw oneself
onto a soft surface; 2. to fall in a deliberate or
premeditated manner, usually for comic effect.